Today on the FISPA member listserv there is a debate going on about the viability of fixed wireless, spurred on by my sharing the article: Cable MSOs beware: Wireless broadband is a growing threat. And this one: Google Fiber: Fixed Wireless for Last Mile May be in Play.

Fixed wireless is a viable option. Many companies make money from it. Yet far more make money from residential via wireless than B2B. There are notable B2B plays in fixed wireless like BOB that Windstream bought; Telepacific has fixed wireless; and Airband that UNSI bought before being bought by GTT. Even XO tried it a few times (and VZ just leased that LLDS spectrum).

From my perspective, I see fixed wireless as something a company cannot dabble in. You need an RF Engineer. You need experience to not only get it working but to keep it working. And as JAB Wireless (now Rise Broadband) proved, a roll-up is expensive and challenging. The equipment has an end of life. There are numerous factors that effect service delivery, including line of sight and noise floor. It isn’t for the timid.

ISPs and CLECs have a resale mentality. They didn’t really build network or own network. They rented network and built up a customer list to be sold. Think about the whole debate about Special Access. If CLECs owned their own network (and destiny) this would be a non-starter. It wouldn’t matter. But 20 years and $1.7 Trillion later, resale still matters. To be fair, it matters to everyone, including cablecos.

Facilities based CLECs have a different mentality. They are building for the long-term. The exit strategy may be a sale, but it is a Built to Last mentality. That is why they seem to lean towards fiber. Fiber is more easily understood. There are numerous business models for fiber – from Cogent to Ideatek to Zayo to Level3. It is what the ILECs are doing in-region, although they do it to escape regulation and the copper plant. Who would say that fiber is a bad plan?

Due to the noise of Google Fiber and Verizon FiOS, even customers don’t want anything but fiber (despite the build-out expense of time and money). I have two mid-market clients now complaining about copper to the building. Can you imagine if it was fixed wireless how freaked out they would be? Why?

Telecom is low on the priority list of most businesses. Just above a root canal I imagine. They just want this stuff to work. Period. They hear that subliminal messaging of fiber — even from the cable companies. Fiber, fiber, fiber. How could they buy anything else? Think about a business associate using a Blackberry or Windows smartphone. What would you think? Yeah.

There are so many flavors of wireless too. Cellular, LTE, LTE-U, licensed, unlicensed, P2P, P2MtP. With fiber, there is fiber. And wireless suffers from cellular being called wireless. All those dropped calls, no bars, and other service issues paint the whole industry with a wide brush.

With copper there is the problem with service delivery that is effected by copper quality, distance from CO, number of pair available and gear used in the central office (CO). ADSL, ADSL2+, VDSL2, G.SHDSL and soon G.Fast are more like wireless where you have to keep upgrading gear to deliver service to the ever-increasing bandwidth consuming customer.

And I have to note that the B2B CLECs have not had great success selling fixed wireless, but use it for faster deployment and redundancy options. Even the CLECs who have acquired B2B Wireless entities have not showcased that talent. There are numerous factors involved – low hanging fruit, core competencies, sales ability, etc.

It might also be valuation. Building fiber networks is as hot as selling data centers right now. If you have investors, they are going to want the CLEC to own fiber. Fiber equals pay day in many people’s heads.

That’s just some of the thinking in the great wireless debate.

These are accurate depictions of what people think about the Gartner MQ. Many people think it is pay-to-play, like everything else in the space.

I was surprised to see that Cogent only does $400M in revenue. Then I was thinking at those prices, how could revenue be more? It can’t.

And it is a problem that all telcos are facing. I say telcos because for cable the business-to-business market is new. All that revenue is increasing (from zero starting at about 2006). Yet for telcos, business and ILEC revenue has been declining. Those revenues have transferred to ITSPs, cable and in some cases just written down as the price per MB of data and Internet continues to decrease at the same time the demand and consumption is increasing.

Windstream broke down their revenue. I am not looking at EBITA, just revenues.

• Total revenues and sales were $1.40 billion in 4Q – flat YoY.
• Total annual rev was $5.63 billion a decline of less than 1% YoY.
• Consumer and small business ILEC revenues were $397 million in 4Q, down 3% YoY.
• Carrier service revenues were $171 million in 4Q, up $2M from 3Q.
• Enterprise service revenues – any account over $1500 — were $498M in 4Q, also up $2M from 3Q.
• Enterprise revenue for the year was $1.95 billion, an increase of 4% YoY. 
• Small business CLEC service revenues were $132 million in 4Q, a decrease of 14 percent from the same period a year ago, and $559 million for the year, a 15 percent decrease year-over-year. [Cable is hammering this market sector]

On the cable front, Mediacom Loses 7,000 TV Customers, Fewest Losses Since ’08. DSLR says that cable is offering TV for almost free with a broadband pack to bolster their TV numbers (and avoid the problem that ESPN and its parent company, Disney, are facing.) Another piece of those numbers that I have not seen suggested is that the small business triple play includes TV for lobbies, etc. These are TV subscribers that are NOT broken out separately.

1. Managing the very small business by Seth Godin.
2. Do You Want Better Board Meetings? by Fred Wilson (a VC)
3. 15 Surprising Things Productive People Do Differently in Forbes.
4. What’s Next In Computing by Chris Dixon with graphs.
5. The Ultimate Guide To eCommerce Email Marketing: This is part 1 and 2 of a whopping 10,000+ word guide to eCommerce email marketing. 
6. Instead of email marketing, ease to use newsletter instead? Try Revue.
7. Finally, Free Tools to Keep Those Creepy Online Ads From Watching You.

This has been a busy week on the road. I spoke at a Channel Sales Kick Off meeting in Cali then spent yesterday in upstate New York doing a strategy session for a product launch for a CLEC. The serendipity part is that the session yesterday was awesome, and then Seth Godin writes about How to Talk about your project today.

SD-WAN is a big topic for telcos in 2016. TW Telecom already was using it to offer dynamic bandwidth – and Level3 has kept that as well as enhancing it. Aryaka is a mashed up startup doing SD-WAN and WAN optimization together. Verizon announced a deal with Viptela for SD-WAN (software defined network).

AT&T is doing landline texting! Frontier rolled this out two years ago. SMS to VoIP and to landlines should be the standard, not something special. BTW, according to the LAT, “more than 18% of California households still relied on landlines for all or most of their phone service as of 2012.”

Google is thinking about Fixed Wireless for last mile!!!

Best Headline today: Hackers are holding a California hospital’s network hostage for $3.6 million [Verge]